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I have to change my site's name and domain. Is using .ninja going to be a huge pitfall?

I have a site that has to change it's domain name and business name. I have 3 to choose that I own. The ones i loke most are new domains ****help.ninja and the***help.com. If I go with ****help.ninja I'm going to 301 to the ***helpninja.com but is it likely to really be hard to rank a .ninja domain?

I also have a really old domain with a suprisingly high domain authority but it's not as memorable but I would rank better faster is my guess. It's the****help.comso not super bad and on topic but everyone likes the .ninja one bette. Everyone I've asked including myself says the .ninja is most memorable and they just like it more. What would you do in my place?

oth are new domains and If I go with .ninja the .com I'm going to 301. I also have a really old domain w suprisingly high domain authority but it's not as memorable but I would rank better faster is my guess. It's the****help.com so not super bad and on topic bit everyone likes the .ninja. what would you do in my place?

7 Responses

Totally depends on your market. 9 times out of 10 I would say don't use a weird extension though. If you are trying to appeal to developers and people that know about the extension,maybe it will work. But otherwise I would stick to a .com, especially one that you have that is aged and has good DA.

I just think it would be "cool" and not hard to remember plus .com would 301. I've been trying to focus on what the user wants and catering towards them instead of the search engine. I also agree with you though, that a new TLD .ninja domain could be risky.

It's a tough one and a hard pill to swallow. If I decided to go strictly ninja, I could use ******helpninja.com as primary but tell people *******help.ninja to go to that URL or advertise on site, but it would just 301 to ******helpninja.com.

Eeek I could see that bad too though huh? Would Google not like a large percentage people accessing the site through a 301 redirect?

If that is the truth, the user wants a .com. They don't know that .ninja exists. Heck, I am a very active developer that works on a lot of projects and does support for companies all over the world, I had to google to see if that one existed.

I don't see all these new domains catching on. Changing 20 years of behavior is hard to do - just look at JCPenney.

Personally, if you told me your website ended in .ninja, I wouldn't take you seriously. Vanity URLs are just for that vanity. Don't get a URL just because it's cool. It's not about what you want, it's about what's easiest for the user.

Oh and one thing I actually thought and still think to some degree the .ninja site would be easiest to remember. I've run it by people and thats the one thing they said...probably because its shorter and sticks in their head. Also I still have the .com registered so if they did screw up it would redirect, but based on everyone's advice I'm going to stick with a dot com.

My guess is that the best for SEO would be to stay away from the .ninja and ninja.com domains altogether, and just go with thetechhelp.com

I already have ninja artwork though and stuff, but I guess what prevents me from using it on the other site. Hmmm

In a lot of your responses, I see you saying "I think". Without sounding rude, its best to put yourself in the user's and your audience's shoes and try to envision how they think.

I would go with a catchy .com. The reason I state this is even if you tell people a million times that it is a .ninja they will most likely search for the .com version anyway. TRUST ME. Then you will have to explain a million times over that "no, its a .ninja" and will get fed up with having to explain it over and over to people. I hate to say that tons of people are dumb or absent-minded, but it's true. .Ninja domains are not popular, and will be harder for them to remember, and also harder for you to market. Technical SEO aside, I dont think it will work well for users. Technical SEO included, I don't think it will work well for rankings due to strange new suffix, whole site being a 301 from .com, people not trusting it therefore not clicking on links, etc etc.

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